How To Simplify Your Life

This week’s newsletter is once again prompted by my favourite podcast. This might read more as a diary entry than a newsletter but hopefully it stirs up some thoughts or emotions that allow you to make changes in your life.

I want to start with the following assumption: life becomes exponentially harder based on how many goals you have.

This is because each time you make a decision you have to filter through a matrix of lenses to ensure it is aligned with some or all of your goals.

Bryan Johnson has one singular goal. To slow his speed of aging. This makes every decision he makes black and white.

https://twitter.com/bryan_johnson/status/1683855033425866755

Most people, including myself have a much greater index of things they need to optimize for.

• Health

• Wealth

• Relationships

• Experiences

• Love

• Most people add many other frivolous things here (high scores, social media followers, home amenities)

Hopefully you can see that each time one of these things gets added to the equation it becomes impossible to move towards all these areas simultaneously.

Thomas Sowell said, “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.”

Assuming that all the above is correct, the only way to simplify your life is to reduce or renounce the list of things you are trying to achieve.

Our brains often tell us the solution to our problems is to just do more:

• Work more

• Sleep less to have more hours

• Earn more money

• Scroll Instagram and watch Netflix at the same time

• Find a new, better recipe

• Make more friends

• Be more aspirational

The problem is that when we make things more complex and therefore don’t achieve our goals, we feel worse about ourselves. This can create a downward negative mental spiral that could be the root cause of many of today’s mental health issues.

Our world of abundance is now hurting us more than a world of scarcity.

This may now seem like an obvious conclusion based on the semantics of the title but of course then, the easiest way to simplify your life is by doing and wanting less.

So what’s the plan then?

Naval has a fantastic quote that says it is much easier to achieve your material desires than renounce them.

It seems logical to me that the path forward must involve some sort of mindfulness practice in order to continually revisit and remind myself that my life, as it is lived today, is better than 99.99% of humans in history.

I’ve carried mindfulness practices in my life before but this podcast may be the push I needed to ensure it has a place cemented in my daily and weekly routine.

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